WHO overrated seriousness of swine flu pandemic, says report
Makes urgent recommendations for greater transparency and better governance in public health
The handling of the H1N1 swine flu pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), EU agencies and national governments led to a ‘waste of large sums of public money, and unjustified scares and fears about the health risks faced by the European public’, according to a report by the Social, Health and Family Affairs Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).
The report, prepared by rapporteur Paul Flynn (UK, SOC), said there was ‘overwhelming evidence that the seriousness of the pandemic was vastly overrated by WHO’, resulting in a distortion of public health priorities.
‘This was a pandemic that never really was,’ said Flynn, who described the vaccination programme as ‘placebo medicine on a large scale’.
The committee identified ‘grave shortcomings’ in the transparency of decisionmaking about the outbreak, generating concerns about the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on decisions taken. In particular, the WHO and European health institutions were not willing to publish the names and declarations of interest of the members of the WHO Emergency Committee and relevant European advisory bodies directly involved in recommendations concerning the pandemic, the committee said.
The WHO has been ‘highly defensive’, the committee said, and unwilling to accept that a change in the definition of a pandemic was made, or to revise its prognosis of the swine flu outbreak.
The committee recommends greater transparency and better governance in public health, as well as safeguards against what it called ‘undue influence by vested interests’. It also calls for a public fund to support independent research, trials and expert advice, possibly financed by an obligatory contribution of the pharmaceutical industry, as well as closer collaboration with the media to avoid ‘sensationalism and scaremongering in the public health domain’.
The report will be debated by parliamentarians from all 47 Council of Europe members during PACE’s summer session in Strasbourg, France.